LinkedIn to lay off hundreds of people amid broader restructuring
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Just taking a few other data points, Twitter (when it was Twitter), had around 7k people, and strikes me as a similar sort of product to LinkedIn, at least the same ballpark. Google has somewhere around 180k (according to public info), and has many products that feel like a LinkedIn sort of size.
Whatever you may think of my other examples, LinkedIn really does seem like an outlier? Am I missing a major aspect of their business? It's a social network, a recruitment service, an ads business. Is that 22k people?
One is that it is possible to guess ballpark figures without knowing the intricacies, and I think anyone with experience in a big tech company of this ilk can probably make a reasonable estimation (to within 50%?).
The other is that it's easy on the inside of these situations to justify each individual role, and miss the fact that the system is too complex and a simplification may be able to drop significant numbers. I'm not suggesting it is too complex, I fully realise there's a different sort of scale involved when you operate a large globally available service like this, but duplication still happens, engineers still make things more complex than they should be, etc.
Sure there are more buttons and inputs, the product does a bit more, but when talking in terms of thousands of employees these sorts of things don't tend to matter a lot, and instead I'd focus more on whole services/businesses, and major complexities such as scale, international businesses, etc. These seem pretty much the same for Twitter/LinkedIn?
New user posts are often “dead” by default and waiting for a long-tenured user to bring it to the front.
Their recruiter portal stuff is pretty complex, which doesn't really show up in the twitter comparison.
This sounds roughly in line with Twitter's (circa 2021) at ~$700k, but a long way from MS/Apple/Google who are all in the $1-2.5m range. Even Amazon is at ~$500k and has many low paid workers, so would likely be much higher if focusing on the tech/product/etc side. It's not terrible, but maybe a little low?
Google is a terrible point of comparison because we have plenty of direct evidence that thousands of people at Google are doing nothing of any consequence to the business
The fact that Google has ~$1.5m revenue per employee suggests that it's a more efficient business than LinkedIn's at $700k.
Generally speaking, it makes sense to keep hiring more workers if you're getting a net benefit from hiring each one. That being said, at a certain scale the organizational challenges may eat into your net marginal profit. (eg unclear ownership and diffusion-of-responsibility, more layers in the org chart making it harder for decision-makers to hear from the people actually doing the work, longer deprecation cycles, etc)
Hiring is hard and slow, so it's definitely possible that the other companies you used as examples were theoretically understaffed. (if you ignore the costs of hiring, anyway)
- Oracle: $310k
- Salesforce: $416k
- Intuit: $830k
- Adobe: $645k
- Workday: $317k
- Meta: $1.5m
Studying these numbers confirms that Google and Meta are indeed extraordinary businesses. Which is not to take anything away from LinkedIn, as they operate in a different market.
More interesting is the hypothetical question: if you were in charge of LinkedIn, how would you prioritize achieving an RPE near the top of the industry against other priorities (perhaps such as increasing market share)?
Even being somewhere in the ballpark of a Google or a Meta is incredible.
As for engineering, a significant number of people are required to keep various services running. But more importantly, a lot of engineer time is wasted in optics and metrics for management.
If management is culled and their way of working is changed from measuring dumb metrics to keeping things steady - the number of engineers required will reduce, albeit only a little.
I suddenly realized that, in this company of ~60K employees, there was a veritable small army of people who were involved in this effort: designing, printing, having printing done, hanging, taking down, etc.
All of that is gone now. Some companies are getting through this economic turndown by simply slowing down hiring, and reassigning people from jobs about which people ask "yeah, but what do these people actually do?" If we get through the end of next year's first quarter without a layoff, I'll give props to senior management.
All of those are US originated and, I suspect, are like mini-countries for a reason. That reason been a lack of a social system in the US. The company provides those offerings that you would expect by a European government.
Hence, you have the HR emails, posters on the wall and so forth.
Large companies are often replicating what other companies just buy because it works at their scale.
Though LinkedIn wrote Kafka, which from afar seems to be a better investment.
Sometimes inefficiency can help retain talent. Sometime in the 1950s, Thomas Watson Jr., the second president of IBM, wanted to retain a bunch of employees at the Poughkeepsie location (which is still an important location for IBM to this day), but IBM didn't have enough work at the time to justify keeping them. According to the story, Watson told these employees to redo the flooring in a massive Poughkeepsie building (Building 012, to be precise) and to take their time. The tactic worked; the flooring was redone (think school gym flooring), and work eventually picked up again for those employees. I heard this story from long-time employees at the IBM Poughkeepsie location.
I sort of make an exception by the blurb being to the name of the company's CEO, because it's always the same and nobody would think anything but that it's an ad.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/16/microsoft-owned-linkedin-lay...
- "LinkedIn is now ramping up hiring in India, according to the person familiar with the matter."
- "The reductions come as the business-oriented social network has seen year-over-year revenue growth slow for eight consecutive quarters."
This makes it sound like the user base did not grow quarter-over-quarter before that period (or at least had some quarters with no growth). That strikes me as quite surprising — why would they have been losing users?
I always assumed they would add new users as kids graduate HS or college and join, but very few people would delete their accounts when they retire. Seems like a recipe for an every-growing user base (even if MAUs stay relatively steady).